Cobblers Dream by Monica Dickens

Transcribed by Rena (wonderful girl)

Chapter One.

  Black and bristling, the long patch of brushwood waited in the blossoming hedge, firm as a new toothbrush.
  At either side, the small white flags moved gently against a colourless sky, and a lark went up, hovering his song.
  The song disappeared in a surge of hooves up the turf of the hill, and in a moment they were pouring over the jump like water, like waves rising to break, in a thunder of flung mud and curses. Then they were gone, bunched together for the downhill turn and fanning out over the low bank on to the sticky plow.
  A man with a black mud face climbed somehow back on to his wild-eyed circling horse, and galloped hopelessly after them. Behind him, the trim line of the new brushwood fence was torn and broken. A ragged bunch of twigs leaned out like a falling tooth.
  A man in a raincoat and a long-legged girl in red woollen stockings climbed through a gap in the hedge from the other side, and the boy who was holding the reins of the grey horse struggling on the ground shouted at them to get a vet.
  Off to the left, beyond a white rail fence, most of the old horses had not even looked up as the surge and thunder of the race broke over the hilltop jump. The thin thoroughbred mare with the scarred chest had trotted the stiff stilts of her legs to the fence to gaze, head-up, long ears stretched, until the last hooves had squelched away downhill. Then she dropped her head mildly to graze again, her ancient teeth pulling the grass bluntly up by the roots, so that she could only press out the sweetness and let the tuft of turf fall.
  None of the horses raised their heads when the shot cracked the damp air, and by the last race of the day, when the rain was beginning, even the old racehorse did not look up as the dark wet horses crashed through what was left of the brushwood fence.

  The point-to-point crowd were going home, wheels spinning in the creamed mud, jeeps bucketing past triumphant, boots slogging through the ruined car park, when Dora came to the gate at the top of the field and whistled. In the distance, round the side of the hill, she could see the crawl of the cars, congealing each time someone stuck in the gateway, and the last damp enthusiasts drifting back across the course.
  It was the last meeting of the season. Tomorrow the tents and ropes and flags would be taken down, the chestnut paling rolled. The cows would be put back on the sour trodden grass where the crowds had milled and cast down betting tickets, and the farmer would harrow the patch of plow.
  'Who won the last race?' Dora asked the spotted pony who was first into the fenced lane that led to the stable yard. The top of his rump was square, and his back flat as a table from years of spangled ladies dancing on him and making pyramids. The pony checked her briefly for sugar and walked on, followed by the yellow Mongolian horse with a cow's high angular hips, and the faded black pit pony who sagged in the middle like a sprung sofa.
  Ronnie Stryker, lounging at the yard gate in skin tight jeans and cowboy boots, a match in his mouth for want of a cigarette, let them through one by one to walk across the cobbles to their own boxes. The horses who were already in banged on their doors and swung their heads about and made false ferocious faces of greed.
  Slugger Jones and Uncle were taking round the feeds; Slugger concealed under a trench coat to his ankles, and the Captain's old fishing hat turned down all round with a fly still in it, Uncle a goblin with a mealy sack across his bent shoulders.
  'The last woman who saw you in that sack said she felt sorrier for you than for the horses,' the Captain told him.
  'So she should be,' Uncle leered under his witch's nose. 'No one here now anyway.'
  'Someone's coming in.'
  Dozens of people went along the road past the farm every day,and some of them threw a remark, flippant, or soppy, or cynical, at the notice board arched over the gate, and a few of them stopped to see what was inside.
  The Captain always let them in. Not for what they would put in the collection box. The year's harvest from the red and white box would not pay the water bill. It was for pride in his horses. And one day Roxanne would come. One day she would be on that road, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, and she would stop. She would have to stop, because the sign said Horses.
  'Yes, it is sweet,' said Dora shortly. She was suspicious of girls who were tall and supple and looked good in the rain. She was busy, but the Captain was mixing a poultice in the saddle room that had no saddles, so she went with them along the boxes that lined three sides of the yard.
  She showed them the gypsy's horse, with a hole where her eye used to be. She showed them the donkeys and the Shetlands and the roan horse from Ireland which had once lifted off a woman's church hat and eaten it. She showed them the brewery horse with the behind like a beer barrel, and she showed them the dusty brown mare who had been on her way to Buckingham Palace and never got there.


  'A man was riding her from Cumberland to London with a petition for the Queen about common grazing rights,' she told them. 'But old Puss broke down a few miles from here, and the man went on by bus.'
  Most people asked why he had never come back for the horse, but the girl's mind did not work that way. She said, 'I prefer the trains myself,' and went on to the next loose box.
  She looked over all the doors, clucking and chirping, but most of the horses had their tails turned and their heads in the manger. Spot came to lick her hand, and she fancied herself special. 'He likes me! They know, you see. They know when you-' She jerked her hand away as the old circus pony tried the edge of his teeth thoughtfully on the palm.
  The man who with her put his hands quickly into his raincoat pockets, but Dora said at the next door: 'Don't worry about black person. You couldn't get near his mouth.' She told them how he had come to them, a farmer's horse stolen out of a field, ridden all night by a gang of boys with a piece of wire in his mouth for a bridle, and left torn and bleeding in a gravel pit with half his tongue gone.
  The girl looked sick, and the man licked his lips, as if he could feel the wire, and said nervously: 'Shouldn't he have been put away then?'
  'He would have been,' Dora said, 'but we got to him first.'
  'At the races,' the girl said, 'there was a horse fell and broke its leg, right at the fence where we were, and they shot it. Wasn't that terrible? I wish I'd known about this place. They could have brought it here.'
  'Not with a broken leg,' Dora said. 'Horses are too heavy. They can't mend.'
  'I thought it was terrible.' The girl did not always register information. 'We were right there, you know. Right there, as close as I am to you. How cruel,' I kept saying. 'The poor beautiful beast,' and the man who had been riding it said: 'Shut up. It's bad enough without that.' He had one of those ever-so voices. You know. They don't care. Then when he took off his fancy red cap and wiped the mud off his face, I saw that he was only a very young boy really. And then, you know' said the girl, with a faraway look in her eyes, because it was an idea, 'I thought perhaps that he did care.'
  'If we go now,' the man said, 'we might make the Antelope for dinner.'


  When it was dark, the old horses ruminated on hay, or stood thinking of nothing, like chickens, or dropped into the light, nervous sleep of an animal whose chief weapon is speed to escape. The pit pony was lying down, forelegs tucked under him, eyes closed, nose resting lightly in the straw. The weaver, who had once carried royalty on parade, rocked gently from foot to foot, swinging his gaunt bay head back and forth over his door. The two Shetland ponies stood head to tail, although there were no flies, and one of the donkeys lay flat out with his head under the manger, as if it were dead.
  In other stables, the horses that had raced that day rested in bandages and expensive initialed rugs, the rain and sweat and mud groomed off them, the burrs and twigs brushed out of their splendid tails. The one that would not race again was a mound at the back of the slaughterer's shed. Under the stained tarpaulin, a hoof stuck out, packed with a clod of turf from the hill.

Chapter Two

 Half an hour after she had ridden into the yard, shouting for Paul, the child went back into the stable and beat the pony.
  When Paul looked over the door, she was standing with the whip in her fist, breathing hard. The pony was rammed against the far wall with his head up, rolling his eye at her and shivering.
  'Why,' Paul said, not making it a question, because Chrissy had done this sort of thing before.
  She turned and gave him the special stare she reserved for employees and girls who went to school by bus, as if she were slapping them up and down with a paintbrush dipped in mud. There was no guilt on her face at being caught. She was twelve, course featured, with dry hairdresser's curls on the ends of her colourless hair, thighs too fat for riding and pale stubby hands, like cheeses.
  'I told you. He bucked after the jump. Twice.' She came to the door and opened it, pushing against Paul's chest.
  'I told you not to use the spurs. Why beat him now? He can't remember.' Paul went in to the pony. Cobby stayed by the wall, leaning against it with his legs braced. Sweat was breaking out on him in streaks, like blood springing under a lash. The boy said his name, and he swung round his head to look at him, his ears moving back and forth suspiciously.
  'He'll remember all right.' The pony jerked his head up again, as Chrissy smacked her whip against the outside of the door.
  'He'll remember pain.' Paul stood back from the pony. He would move to touch him later, when the child was gone.
  'I've told my father all along,' she said in that high Chrissy voice, thick and nasal because her mother would not risk having her adenoids out. 'He'll have to get me something better. This beastly thing is useless. He makes a mistake every time.'
  'It's you who's useless,' Paul said, because there were times when he did not care if the child got him fired or not, and he would not have stayed this long if it had not been for the Cobbler. 'He didn't make a mistake the year before last, when he was properly ridden.'
  Chrissy could not deny it, for that was why her father had bought the chestnut pony, so she stuck out her underlip and said: 'That Mason girl. She shouldn't be in juvenile jumping anyway. Everyone knows she's been sixteen for years.'
  And then she remembered, and her sulky face lifted into a mean rodent smile. 'Anyway, you don't know what happened the year before last. You were in gaol.' She triumphed off across the yard in her shiny boots, swatting her whip at harmless things like drainpipes and buckets, looking for insects to stamp on.

  It was true, Paul had been, if not actually in gaol, in the borstal institution proper to his age.
  It had not technically been his fault, but he had given up saying: 'It wasn't my fault' to people who were sick of hearing juvenile delinquents unload responsibility on to parent, schools, psychiatrists, the Government - anyone behind whom they could shuffle with a chance of getting away with it.
  It had been his fault too - the actual crime. He had gone into it willingly, even with relish. But the degree of blame which fell on him was not, and it would have been only probation and not Borstal, if the Hyena and his lot had not let him down.

  Why had he kept his mouth shut and let them get away with it? The Hyena..... more like a lizard with that greenish-black hair slick on the narrow sloping head. But the laugh, the cackle. It curdled you. Borstal was safe, at least, and if Paul had been at large and the Hyena inside, he would have heard that laugh in his dreams until the day he heard it just behind him in a dark alley, and knew that the Hyena was out and seeking revenge.
  When Paul was free, he had gone once more to his mother. This time the door was not locked against him, but she was not there. A strange family was in the house, and no one knew where she had gone, or if they did, they were not telling, not with Paul a disgrace to the street, and the Borstal officer standing there beside him, trying unsuccessfully to look like everybody's uncle.
  Chrissy's father was on the youth committee because 'one has to pull one's weight' in a town on whose crowded park benches he had slept thirty years ago rawboned and idle in the shadow of the idle factories. He had offered to take Paul into his stables, since 'the boy seems to be interested in horses - one point in his favour, Mr Chairman, you'll agree.' It was a satisfactory proposal. He got all the credit for a gesture more generous and practical than his colleagues' anxious theories, but his groom would have the trouble of training Paul, and seeing that he did not run away or steal.
  Paul instantly disliked the groom, who wore his cap dead flat like a kettle lid and treated the horses as if they were no more than horses. He was afraid of Chrissy's father, who had left poverty too far behind to remember, like being born. He was discouraged by the mother's instability, in some ways worse than his own mother's predictable neglect, and he had always hated Chrissy since long ago when he had seen her at a local show, a brat of eight in a precocious bowler hat, riding a pony that was too good for her in spurs. But when they bought the chestnut pony, he knew that he would stay.
  Cobby was golden in full sun and copper in the evening light, with quarters round like an orange, a square chest and a neck like a stallion. He was styled like a small horse, but his head was pure pony, square nosed, with short curved ears and a jaunty dark blue eye. His full name was Cobbler's Dream. He had begun to make his mark as a show-jumper, and could have gone on to glory, but not with Chrissy. She was the kind of child a horse hates, and in their first show together, she had pulled him so cruelly off balance that Paul had to go behind the stewards' tent because he could not watch.
  The day after he caught Chrissy beating the Cobbler, Paul rode him out to exercise while she was at school. When he shied at a piece of paper and then again at nothing, it could have been nervousness from yesterday, but when he stumbled twice on a smooth piece of turf, there was something wrong. He never stumbled. He had small, close-packed hoofs like little drums, each one thudding neatly down as if that particular piece of ground had existed since time began for nothing else but to receive his stride.
  Two days later, Chrissy had him out in the jumping ring, for the first show of the season was only a week away. She was iron fisted as ever, with her jockey cap rammed down over her eyes and her sullen underlip lying on her face like a caterpillar. When she finally let him go at the brush, he cleared it awkwardly, nothing like his usual rubber-balled style.
  'Give him a chance!' Paul shouted, and she turned to make a face at him, but at the next jump, it was clearly Cobby who did not give the child a chance. The groom had called to her to keep her hands forward, and she did, but the pony came into it all wrong, hit the jump with his square chest and fell in a tangle of legs and rails and fat child looping a slow loop on to the wet grass.

  She was not hurt. She had good shock absorbers where she landed, but her howls raised windows in the house a hundred yards away. The groom had to take her back to the house, to show that he thought more of her than the horse, for his wife liked the cottage that went with this job. The pony seemed alright, so on the way back to the stable Paul hopped him over a small log that he had jumped a hundred times without checking his stride.
  Then he knew. In the stable, he suddenly flung up his hand at the side of the pony's head. The fear was reality.
  When the vet came, he told Chrissy's father what Paul already knew. Cobbler's Dream was totally blind in the left eye.
  After some tests, he said that it appeared to be an injury to the optic nerve, caused by some kind of blow. 'The pony has knocked his head when he was turned out perhaps, sir?'
  The vet was a perfectionist in a town where money often spoke louder than finesse, but there were five classy horses here and a lot of expensive fuss about injections and blood tests, so the soap was lathered.
  'He's never turned out,' Chrissy's father said impatiently. 'Too risky. If I told you what I paid for him.'
  Soap was one thing, but the vet did not have to be impressed into begging him to tell. 'Then he must have done it in the stable, sir,' he said. 'It's just bad luck. He could have hit his head almost anywhere else and done no harm.'
  'Bad luck!' Chrissy's father rounded on Paul, nervously chewing hay in the yard outside the box full of elite, which included the mother in a poodle jacket and shoes like arrowheads, and the groom, who could not be found to blame, because his last employer had a title. 'Did you do this, boy? A clever pony doesn't bang himself about. He's been hit, that's clear. If you did this Paul, by God, I - I'll have you sent back to where you came from!'
  'He's probably too old,' Chrissy said calmly. 'He's almost eighteen.' Her father had not told her that Paul had been in Borstal, but with her genius for hurting, she had found out, and so there were very few people in the neighbourhood who did not know.
  'Did you do this?' The man's broad face was crimson, the nose mottling to purple. 'Not that he'd tell,' he said to the embarrassed vet. 'The boy's a chronic liar.'
  Paul shook his head. Even these people knew how he felt about the Cobbler, even if they did not understand. The suggestion was too absurd to answer, and whatever he said, it would be called a lie. Chrissy would not look at him. He stared hard at her, trying to force her to look, but she would not turn her head. She was leaning against the manger and biting her nails; not stroking the pony, as another child would do with an injured pet. He was not her pet. He was just a vehicle on which she planned to win fame.
  But now no more. Cobby would always be blind in that eye, the vet said, and he would be lucky if the other eye did not eventually go too. Chrissy's father, who believed that anything would come right if you just paid enough, brought an impressive gentleman in a brown suit and bowler to match down from the Royal Veterinary College in London, but the verdict was the same.
  As a show jumper, Cobbler's Dream was useless, finished, and Chrissy's father was going to have him destroyed and collect the insurance.
  When Paul heard that, he went into his small room behind the tack room, where the pin-up pictures were horses, not girls. He lay face down on the low iron bed, not crying, but tensed tight, clutching the edge of the mattress, fighting the terrible feeling in his head and limbs that he would go berserk and scream and yell and hurt somebody. Take a gun and shoot somebody.

  When he was younger, he sometimes used to scream and throw furniture about, and when his mother was drunk, she would throw it back and scream too, for it was she who had taught him the hysteria of noise. He had done it once or twice when he first went to Borstal, to call attention to himself among the regimented pack. Unimpressed, they had told him to grow up, and left him no alternative.
  At fourteen, it had been easy to go berserk. At eighteen, it might turn out to be a creaking affair, like an old man playing hopscotch. It would not help the Cobbler if he made a fool of himself.
  When he had grown calmer, he got up and went to the house. He tried to reason with Chrissy's father. He pleaded' suggested work that Cobby could still do, good homes that he could go to.
   'Whose pony is it?' was all the man would say. Except when he said: 'Considering that I'm still not sure it wasn't your fault, you'd better shut up and remember who's been kind to you.'
  Outside, Paul turned back and looked at the lighted window where the man sat reading his evening paper, his ugly blunt fingers round a glass. Kind! Don't make me laugh. You can't take life away from that pony just because he's no use to you. Who made you God all of a sudden? if you kill the Cobbler, Paul said to him in silence, no hell is bad enough for you.
  In the year he had been here, his ramshackle life had grown round the chestnut pony like a man in love. He had known horses, many of them on his grandfather's farm, where he had spent the intervals of his childhood in between his mother's bouts of love or guilt or loneliness, when she dragged him back to town with her. Later the brewery horses had been like long-lost friends to him, shining, moustache cared for with greater pride than the beer. He had felt close to a horse often, but never, as sometimes with Cobby, as if he actually was that horse: feeling the high back teeth inside his own head when the pony was grinding his grain, knowing on his own skin how it felt when he shivered off a fly.
  He responded to Paul's thought, as a dog trotting ahead will stop and look round if you concentrate on him. The pony would always turn his head, or lift it from the gleanings of his hay to look up and over the door at the boy's unspoken call.
  Long ago, Paul's grandmother used to tell him stories of animals she had talked to, and what they had said. He had believed her then, and the belief had returned, with Cobbler's Dream.
  How to explain this to anyone? Least of all to Chrissy's parents, who had only taken up horses in the first place because it was a more expensive hobby than golf.
  Chrissy had avoided Paul, not surprisingly. It was not until the end of three terrible days, most of which he spent with Cobby when he was not pleading or arguing with his owners, that he managed to catch her alone. Her parents were out, and when the chauffeur brought her home from school, Paul was waiting for her behind the big yew at the front door.
  When the car drove off, he stepped out and said in his roughest gangland voice: 'I want to talk to you.'
  Chrissy squeaked, but he pulled her round the corner of the house and into the back hall where they keep the boots and the fishing rods.
  'Let me go!' The fat child opened her mouth to scream, but Paul put his hand over it and only took it away when she bit him.
 'You hit Cobby on the head,' he said quickly, to keep her quiet. She looked at him shiftily for a second to see how much he knew. Then she stuck her frizzed hair in the air and said;' You taste disgusting, Borstal boy,' and moved her lips and tongue in and out as if she had just eaten a bad shrimp.

  'You blinded him,' Paul said.
  'If you think so, why don't you tell them?' Although they hated each other at this moment perhaps more than ever, she put herself on his side against her parents by calling them Them, and Paul knew that she was afraid.
  'They wouldn't believe me. You have to tell them,' Paul said. 'You can't stand back and let them kill your pony because of what you did.'
  'He should be put out of his misery.' She was turning to go, but Paul caught her roughly by the wrist with the charm bracelet.
  'He's not in misery. He can't jump, but he could hack around. The vet said so.'
  Chrissy tried to pull her hand away, and when she could not, she shrugged and let it go limp. 'And stumble and kill someone. No thanks. He's going tomorrow by the way.' She watched Paul closely with her pebble eyes. 'Daddy has found a grey that was second in the Pony Club finals last year, and it's coming on trial. Didn't they tell you?'
  It was like a stopper being taken out, and all the sap of life being drained away. 'What time is the vet coming?' Paul managed to ask.
  'Not the vet, you dope. The knacker. You get more money if he's taken away alive. Daddy told me. About twelve pounds for a carcass. Thirty or forty if they kill it at their own place, because they can sell it for human consumption. To eat, you know,' she added, enunciating the words as if he were deaf. 'You'd be surprised how many people in the Midlands like horse meat.'
  Her teeth had wires on them because Nature had stuck them out like the rat she was. They were almost knocked in then, and the wires superfluous, but Paul slackened his fingers, and she looked at her wrist for a moment critically, shaking the ugly bracelet, and then went into the house.
  When Paul announced he was leaving, the mother said thank you, that would save her embarrassment, since Chrissy had told them how roughly he had treated her, and they had been going to send for him to say that he must go. His probation had expired several weeks ago. They need no longer be responsible for him. He should be ashamed of himself for terrifying a helpless child and proving himself so ungrateful for all that had been done for him, et cetera, et cetera. She was in a lecturing mood and hard to stop.
  Where would he go? He had no idea, but he knew what he was going to do. He went to Chrissy's father and offered him forty pounds for the Cobbler, the knacker's highest price. The broad red man laughed. He was busy checking accounts, but he took the time to raise his head and laugh.
  Paul went to Chrissy. 'This is blackmail,' he said out of the side of his mouth. 'Either I tell them what you did, or you go and beg your father to let me buy Cobby, using all the phony charm.' He did not think she had any charm, phony or not, but her father did.
  She was as mean as twenty grown ups, but she was still a child. Paul put his hands on her neck and made a horror film face at her, and she was afraid, and did what he asked, although it was possible that her father might not even have mind the truth of what she had done. They were that kind of people.
  Paul waited until all the lights were out in the ugly pebbled house and in the cottage where the groom slept neat and short legged beside his contented wife, before he came through the tack room carrying his shoes, because the yard was graveled.
  He did not speak or whistle in the stable yard, but two of the horses called to him, in the futile hope that it was breakfast.
  'Shut up,' he said at the door of the box, as Cobby dropped the trumpet of his head and fluttered his nose in a softer greeting. 'You want to spoil everything?' He had cut up some feed bags earlier, and he tied the sacking round the pony's feet with baling string and led him out of the stable. Not stealing. He had included the price of the halter in the money he had posted to Chrissy's father that afternoon, all his savings except twenty shillings. It was too risky to hand it over personally, in case he laughed and said that he had changed his mind. That was why Paul was getting out now. Too risky to wait until morning.
  The pony stumbled a lot, mostly because of the mufflers, for he was adjusting himself to being one-eyed, but Paul did not take off the sacking until they were past the last houses and out into the country. There was no moon, but the sky was full of lightless radiance that kept away the dark. A thin vapour of mist floated just above the grass, and the trees rose rootless out of the shrouded hedges.
  Paul walked fast, and Cobby paced his neatly sprung legs beside him, swinging his head round to peer at things he could sense, but could not see.. It felt like an adventure, a thousand times more exciting than that shivering wait on the river steps by the warehouse. It felt like a desperate rescue, although the pony was his, because the morning light might have brought Chrissy's father going back on his word. It might have brought the knacker.
  As the miles went by, it grew darker and colder, and the road grew harder and the hills steeper, but it was the night of all nights, because he had something of his own. He was alone with the Cobbler and the world was theirs.

Chapter Three

  His hair curled like a wet black retriever, and there was about him a look of enduring boyhood which would be particularly irritating to someone like Ronnie Stryker, who had been jaded before his teens.
  Ronnie called him Curly, and stuck to it. Dora never called him anything but Paul. She had fought against being Dossie at home ever since she was old enough to feel the humiliation of a forced nickname. Uncle called him Laddie, and Slugger Jones called him nothing, since he never addressed anyone directly, but only through himself. When the Captain first saw him, he had called him a thief, or at least asked him if he was one.
  Dora had been alone in the yard when Paul and the pony came weaving in. They had walked all night, and when they stopped under the arched entrance, Paul leaned against the wall because he could not stand up any longer.
  Dora was coming out of the feed shed with a tub of mash for the old pit pony with the useless teeth. 'Customer?' she asked, looking at Cobby, who was sagging, with his neck stuck out like a decrepit cab horse.
   When Paul told her where they were from, she said: 'If he can walk that far, he shouldn't be in here,' and wished she had not, for the boy said hoarsely: 'You've got to take him.'
  When Dora fetched the Captain from the house, Paul had told him that the pony was a family pet who had been blinded in an accident. His people could not afford to keep a horse that could not work. They would have him destroyed unless the Farm could take him.
  The Captain listened sympathetically. Many of the horses in his stable had been under the death sentence before they found reprieve here. But when they saw the Cobbler, dragging hay out of the rack in the corner box as if he had not eaten for weeks, he said at once: 'I know that pony. Seen it jump at shows.
  'You can't have,' said Dora, who took people at their declared value and had recently got them all into trouble by accepting a horse that had been stolen out of a field because it had a sad face. 'It's been pulling his father's junk cart.'
  'Junk my foot,' the Captain said, beetling at Paul with his jaw and eyebrows set in what he believed was a look of craggy militarism. 'This pony has never pulled anything in it's life but hay. I saw him win at the Three Counties. Year before last. The Mason girl. She outgrew him and went to some rich brat with hands like hunks of concrete.'
  'Must have been some other pony, sir,' Paul said nervously, blinking and swaying from foot to foot because he was so tired, and Dora, wanting to support him without knowing what was up, said: 'I saw the Mason's pony jump. It was a much lighter chestnut, and not so -'
  'Cobbler's Dream,' the Captain said. 'Did you steal him, boy?'
  He fired like a rocket, and Paul fired back: 'He's mine! I bought him. He's blind. He's got to be taken care of. If you won't do it, I'll find somewhere else.' Pushing past the Captain, he wrenched open the door of the stable and went in, fumbling to get the halter on the pony.
  'Hold on,' the Captain said. I haven't said I won't take him. But you'll have to tell me the truth.'
  Paul must have told him enough, for the Captain asked Tiny to put him to bed in the attic room that had been empty since William walked out in a sulk, and when he woke up twelve hours later, he offered him a job.
  'What about his family?' Dora asked. 'You don't want them pounding down here in wrath and threatening to sue you because he's under age.' She looked at the Captain straight-faced, testing if it would be a joke, because it had happened with her parents and it had not been funny then, and since it was only six months ago, it might not be funny yet.

 The Captain was not going to laugh before she did, but he winked at her with the eye that could - the other lid was stretched tight by the scar across the corner - to show her that he had recovered from the harangue and the table-thumping, and said: 'He'll be eighteen next month, and he invented the junk merchants. He has no family. The pony is a genuine case. His other eye will eventually go, there's no doubt, and the boy may as well stay too, if he can do the work. Don't narrow your eyes at me. You know we've been short handed since William left unsung. A sixteen year old girl in red pants, a crumpled old man of seventy, a punch-drunk flyweight and that delinquent in the cowboy boots - what an outfit. My old Sergeant-major would die. You should be glad of a little new blood.' Dora did not say anything, so he added defensively: 'and at least he has a pair of jodhpurs.'
  Dora put her hands in the pockets of the red slacks and looked up at him. 'Nothing to do with you not wanting to part the boy and his pony, I suppose?' she said bluntly.
  Apart from being too short and too snub and too brown and healthy when everyone else was cultivating a sick indoors look of willowing pallor that drove the games mistress mad, it was Dora's bluntness that had excluded her from the paramount activities of the Grammar School seniors. Other girls said to the boys; 'You slay me, honest, you're a doll,' and: 'I'll bet you could sing on TV if you got a break.' Dora had said: 'if that's meant to be funny, I don't get it,' and: 'Is that singing or a soul in pain?'
  The boys had ignored her. They had gone away and left her dateless in a generation whose little sisters were going steady and wearing rings. The Captain did not answer either. He walked away, but he turned on the cinder path that led from the stables to the kitchen door and said: 'You should know by now - I'm not a sentimental man.'
  This was a favourite expression born perhaps of his dislike of the kind of fake sentiment he often met in his job. People who drooled over the veteran horses, crying; 'Poor fellow, what's the matter then?' to a contented old sway back. The woman who had threatened him with a rolled umbrella when she came to see her decrepit old hunter after ignoring him for two years, and found him gone too soon to the Elysian grazing.
 Not a sentimental man, the Captain said, but of genuine sentiment he had a larger measure than he knew.
 'And in any case,' he added, turning around again and seeing that Dora was still looking at him, 'I telephoned the man who used to own the pony, to check the story. He has the boy's money, so he can't do a thing, but he kept insisting that the pony should be put down, as if nothing else would satisfy him. Some sort of sour grape revenge, because he thinks the boy caused the injury.'
  'Oh, no!'
  The Captain shrugged and walked on into the house, followed by the ugly little yellow mongrel with a broad flat muzzle like a hippopotamus, whom he had found as a dying puppy in a house of filth and despair, the very slums of hell.
  On her way to start cleaning stables, Dora looked over the chestnut pony's door. Paul was grooming him, and the pony stood with one ear back and one ear forward, relaxed to enjoy it.
  'Must have had better fitting harness than most junk dealers,' Dora said. 'No collar galls. No trace marks.'
  'Told you Ginger was a pet, didn't I?' Paul kept his face away, pounding the pony's firm neck into satin.


  'Don't bother with the Ginger stuff,' Dora said. 'The Captain told me everything.'
  'He believed me?'
  'He telephoned the man who used to own Cobbler's Dream and heard that your story was true.' As Paul turned in surprise, she realised that the Captain had possibly not meant to tell him. Ah well. Too late now. People should learn not to tell her their secrets.
  'That's all he heard then.' It was neither a statement nor a question, elaborately casual.
  'You mean - that the man thought you had hit Cobby. Well I don't believe it, and I'm sure the Captain -'
  'Oh that.' The boy laughed through his nose, and turned back to the pony.
  Ronnie Stryker, who came in from the Town three miles away, was always late. He had slid away with it so far, because his uncle was the Captain's forage dealer, who made price concessions for a worthy cause. But if the worthy cause was to be not for horses, but the employment of the shock haired nephew with the weaving walk, was it worth it?
  'Who's this?' Ron demanded when he hurtled in on his motorcycle, scattering chickens and puppies, and found Paul on the feed barrow with Dora. Mincing in the boots that gave the Captain nightmares - but uncle or no uncle, it was not so easy to find boys or men to work in a stable these days - Ron approached Paul.
  'Come to give us a hand, eh? Very nice of you, I'm sure. Much obliged.' He bowed down to Dora, who made a gorilla face at him. 'Your servant, madam.'
 
  Paul grinned briefly and took the hand that Ron held out, but drew it back quickly, for there was a tin tack in the palm.
  'Stryker's the name,' Ron said affably. 'Anything you want, just ask for me. They know me here.'
  'They won't much longer,' Dora said, digging the measure into the grain and chaff mixture in the big wooden barrow, 'if you don't start mucking out. I've fed your side. For their sake, not yours.'
  'She's so yewmanitarian.' Ronnie stuck as much of his hands as he could into the front pockets of his tight jeans, raised his shoulders to his ears and jazzed his feet a little, shadowed eyelids drooping, face blank as a wedge of processed gruyere. When Paul came out of Trotsky's stable with the empty feed tub, he shot at him through the match which was always between his lips: 'I seen that face before.'
  'Not likely.' Paul went to the barrow and Ron bent to peer into his face, for the boy was shorter than he, though more solidly built.
  'Funny.' Ron said, 'I never forget a face. Can't afford to, the way things are these days. Didn't you used to live in Town?' He named a street near the canal, where the worst slums were. 'Remember the Bleeker Street raid? Remember the Roxy, the night they burned the screen?'
  Paul shook his head. 'Not me.'
  'Your living double then, Curly, though it was a year ago. Just shows you, don't it? I'd have sworn in blood I'd seen you around with the Hyena and his lot.'
  Paul kicked open Mrs Berry's door and grunted at him sharply to get back, although the old roan with the mild, surprised face would fall over his cracked feet trying to get out of the way. He did not come out until Ron had moved off, whistling a blackbird phrase, and he did not talk any more to Dora; only to the horses.

Chapter Four

The Farm, whose oldest buildings went back three centuries, had been rebuilt as stables almost a hundred years ago when the national conscience was slowly awakening to the idea that charity might be applied to those who went on four legs, as well as two, and the RSPCA was hounding the Government to strengthen the animal laws.
  It was started as a convalescent home for the many horses who then worked on the steep and slippery streets of the manufacturing town, which crawled up the sided of the wide green valley like spreading grey cancer. Falling sick through neglect or ignorance, injured in falls and street accidents, lamed by drivers to whom the horse was no more than the engine not yet invented to replace it, they came to the Farm for the care they could get nowhere else.
  Veterinary surgeons were few, and too expensive for the underpaid carter, the street trader with his pony and barrow. For them there were only the quacks, horse doctors and cow leeches, who had half a dozen crippling failures for every miracle cure.
  When a horse was too far gone to work, he might be finished off by the pole-ax or the iron-headed mallet, lucky if the first blow fell true, hoofs slipping in panic on the blood of his fellows whose throats had already been cut - often before stunning - watched with idle interest by the children who lived in the rotting houses that overlooked the knacker's yard.
  Or he might, when he was past work, simply go on working. The choice was not his to make, but if it had been, he might have chosen the slaughterhouse, with all its pain and terror. The men who administered the Farm for the rich old lady who founded it bought many stumbling, half blind skeletons, mockeries of a horse's essential beauty, to give them the reward of a few months' or a few years' rest, and then humanely, rest for ever.
  The British are accused of being more sentimental about animals than about children, but in those passionless years of industrial progress when the old lady had the vision to endow her farm, few people were sentimental enough about either to care what was going on. Children had been freed from the mines, but were still being used as cheap labour in factories and sweat shops. They were still being abused and half starved in institutions and schools to whom they were important only for the money that was paid for the board and education they did not get.
  Children could not be legally sold, but there was good money in the export to the continent of live horses - only just alive.
  Old worn out workers, many of them diseased and hopelessly lame, were stuffed into the holds of bucketing ships, packed like sardines to keep them upright. Half dead with a seasickness far worse than any human experience, since a horse cannot actually vomit, they were herded out on to the docks of France and Belgium. Those who had not broken a leg on the nightmare crossing were then goaded to walk five miles or more to the abattoir, where they would be killed with the knife, or the blunt hammer which did not always strike mercifully the first time.
  There were Belgians living along the road who closed their shutters against the sight of these pitiable wrecks, shambling so meekly towards their death. The Veterinary College at Brussels sent students to the docks at Antwerp, not to save the horses, but to observe them, since they had every imaginable disease and deformity.
  On market days, especially after harvest, someone from the Farm would often bring an old shire horse destined for export to save his winter keep. Or sometimes they would rescue a decrepit thoroughbred, or a broken kneed hackney which once had stepped high and showy between the shafts of a Tilbury gig.
  In those canting Victorian days of hour-long family prayers which had little expression in the lives of those who imposed them, a riding or driving horse was seldom a pet. When he was past work, it was possibly the groom's job to dispose of him. Since /Saucisson d'Anvers/ was popular, the groom could get a higher price than the knacker's from a Belgian dealer, and pocket the extra.
  The trade was so lucrative that it was not until 1950 that the export of live horses for slaughter was finally stopped, but they could still be legally exported to Ireland. Nearly a hundred years after those first decrepit refugees had come dot-and-carry into the brand new stables, to a humane death or a reprieve of quiet grazing, Mrs Berry rode in triumphantly in the back of a hired horse box with the raw-boned roan she had bought at an Irish port.
  They came out together, the horse and the brightly coloured little woman, holding on to his halter rope, as she had done throughout the journey for fear he might get claustrophobia if he was tied. She led him herself to his stable and wept gently over him as he dropped his ugly old head into the manger for his first feed.
  He was a hideous animal, mottled slate and strawberry, with two inches of stiff erect mane which never grew any longer, a head like a clumsily built coffin and a blank wall eye. Mrs Berry adored him. She had saved him from the guillotine, she said, and called him Evremonde, but no-one at the Farm called him anything but Mrs Berry.


  She was so in love with the horse and what she had done for him that she was planning another trip to Ireland to bring back three more.
  The Farm could not refuse them, since she had given money generously for years, and had handed over Evremonde with an heiress's dowry. The Captain, however, did hint that when horses were bought up at the ports, the dealers usually supplied more, to keep the export number up and to keep the philanthropists happy.
  Mrs Berry did not want to hear that. Throwing about her head and throat long pieces of the lavender material left over from her bedroom curtains, and grabbing, as they passed through the feed shed, a fistful of crushed oats to eat like toffees, she told the Captain he had the wrong spirit for his job and that if he had no room for her horses, he would have to build more boxes, and would see about financing them when she had checked his spirit.
  In the early days, the Farm had done a brisk business in holidays for the Town's horses and ponies. They came for two weeks to kick their heels at grass and blow the smoke out of their lungs. Many came back year after year, pulling their cart into the yard with ears eager. When they had turned out, they bucked and kicked and raced in mad thudding circles, crumpled down to roll, legs struggling like frantic beetles, grunted up to snort and shake, and then dropped stubby heads to graze, tearing at the grass like drunkards.
  When a pony's two weeks were up, he would often be found near the gate of the long meadow, sensing it was time to go: but you could not catch him. You could put your hand on him any day during the two weeks, but when his time was up, he might be by the gate, but it would take three men to corner him.
  There were still a few coster ponies who came up the hill for a break each spring. Titch was a regular, and so was Taffy, the fat Welsh pony the colour of vanilla ice cream, who had every woman and child running out with biscuits and sugar as he went by with his cart of plants and bay trees and little pyramid firs, and who would never stand to wait unless his front feet were on the pavement.
  But the town's working horses were few, and getting fewer. The brewery kept less than a dozen, and four of them were the chairman's coaching team, and pulled no barrels or bottles of beer. With the slums coming down and new estates going up, the back alley stables and odorous sheds were disappearing too. You might have a cart and a license to sell firewood, but you could not keep a pony on a council estate. A greengrocer had tried it once with a tool-shed as camouflage, and been denounced by the neighbours - those who were not coming to him for manure.
  Some of the displaced ponies were sold in the cattle market, and only God knew what became of them. Others came to the Farm. 'The stable's gone, see, I got a little van now, but I couldn't sell this chap. Been like a child to me, has Topper, good times and bad, and all the kids know him.'
  The question was sometimes asked by visitors, and had been asked recently by the Animal Man of the regions' television, who was going to include the Farm in a future show: 'Now that there is less cruelty to animals, and less horses anyway, why is this place always full? Hasn't the need for it somewhat disappeared?'
  'There's is always need,' the Captain said. 'Short of an accident, a horse can't usually work right up to the end.'
  'You don't advocate then the, er - ' throat cleared - 'humane killing of horses who are, let's say, past it?'
  'Not unless they are suffering, or totally decrepit,' said the Captain in a voice that closed the subject. It was obviously not going to be discussed on children's television, and he was not going to discuss it now with the Animal Man, who seemed less an animal lover than a zoologist who had latched on to a good thing.
  'Because there is less cruelty,' he said more civilly; 'there are more voluntary inmates. The horses that came here in the old days were mostly rescued from people who could not have understood what the farm was all about, even if they had heard of it. Many of our horses now come from good owners who feel the same as we do. They pay a bit if they can afford to, and they come and visit the old fellows.'
  'It's an inspiring thing,' the Animal Man said, quite carried away, as he mentally jotted a few stirring lines for the script, 'that the dark old days are gone for ever, and man is at least enlightened enough to treat the beasts as brothers.'
  So then the Captain took him out to see Prince, who had been found with his jaw tied to his fetlock, three days after he was stolen, and Negro with the ruined mouth, the victim of teenage Night Riders.
  'There's a queer hard streak,' he said, 'a tradition of Midlands cruelty, that has never been broken. They've had it all: bull baiting, bear baiting, fighting cocks, cats skinned alive, crowds shrieking with joy as a dog and a monkey tore each other to bits. The Romans must have been here centuries back and taught them to lay bets on cruelty. If you knew the right people, you could go today to a cockfight, or a terrier hunt where the rats are bred to be let out under the noses of the dogs. Make a nice item for your programme. You could see mice made drunk enough to race, and half the folding part of a wage packet gambled away on them.
  I knew a man once who used to race pieces of maggoty cheese across the table,' said the Animal Man, mildly smiling.


But when they got to Prince's box, and then Negro's, his smile was gone and so was his mildness. 'This goes on?' he asked, frowning the prawn eyebrows that the studio make-up girl wanted so badly to trim. 'These things are really happening?'
  'Why not? It's part of the national disease. In the south they slash cinema seats. In the north they smash up railway carriages. Here they take it out on horses. That's why we bring ours in every night.'
  The Animal Man was going to have to revise his script, or else not talk to the youngsters about their enlightened generation. He turned away from Negro, baffled, and Ron Stryker, who had been mouthing and mugging behind his back like a ventriloquist's doll, said: 'Oh yes, it's shocking, sir. It's really shocking.
  'Although I think,' the Captain said that evening in the farmhouse, 'that he knows more about it than he'll say. He probably even knows some of the gangs, eh, boy?'
  Paul shrugged and filled his mouth, but Tiny, passing behind him, nudged him with her powerful elbow, so that he was forced to say through baked apple so hot that the treacle was molten ore: 'How would I know?' And tried to make it sound both innocent and polite.
  On Tiny's washing day, when she wrestled with wet sheets in the wind and boiled up great cauldrons of water laced with a vicious bleach that was the undoing of all but the stoutest fabric, they all ate supper in the stone-floored kitchen. On other days, the Captain sat formally with candles in the cold little dining -room, whether he had guests or not. He would have preferred the kitchen, but Tiny was afraid that he was going to seed from hanging about the stable all the time. As long as she had breath in her body to gasp her way along the passage with a loaded tray, she was not going to see things let go.
  She had returned from a trip down to the village saying that she could not find a lodging for Paul, which was true in the sense that she had not even looked. There was something about the boy which seemed to claim her. It was the same quality that she had recognised in Slugger, when she scared the life out of him by announcing that they were going to be married. It was not helplessness. Paul was resilient and vigorous, and so had Slugger been in those early days. But there had been a suggestion of rootlessness, of drifting, as there was with Paul, a feeling that whatever was strong in his nature would only hold fast under guidance.
  Slugger Jones, without knowing it, had called to Tiny to direct his life. Paul seemed a challenge too, and her protective strength was abundant. After her husband and the Captain and the fledglings and small wounded animals she rescued, there was enough left over for the son who would have been almost Paul's age if he had lived more than ten minutes after birth.
  So Paul stayed in the attic room with the wide brick chimney warming the whole end wall, and the gabled window showing him the stable yard, with the corner box just in view, and the white-blazed perfection of the Cobbler's clever little head.
  The square stone farmhouse with the steep roof and tall Tudor chimneys was set right at the top of the hill, looking down to the village directly below, and far beyond that, the darkening verges of the town. A frame of trees surrounded the house, so that from the valley, it looked like the other uninhabited clumps along the range of hills. The people in the valley could not see the Farm, which did not trouble them, since it was too cranky an enterprise to be interesting, but the people at the Farm could see the smoky valley through a gap in the trees at the end of the front lawn. When the weather made her restless, Tiny would stand there with the Captain's field glasses, scanning the landscape like a storm-tossed admiral, her skirts whipped flat to her strong legs and her short grizzled hair blown out like puppy's ears.
  It was Tiny who had secured the job at the Farm, by selling herself as a housekeeper, which she had never been, rather than her husband as a stableman. Not that Slugger did not know quite a bit about horses, or had once, before a lot of it was pounded out of him, along with a few things he had picked up at school, and the ability to communicate freely with his fellows.
  He could still talk to horses, in a slow grumbling monotone which they seemed to find soothing. But to ask a question of anyone, he had to say: 'I wish I knew if......' or: 'I wonder when he's going to tell me how.....' If he wanted to make a statement it had to be: 'He'd ought to know....' or: 'She'll find out that....'
  He was a small man with not much hair, slow-moving now, but very agile in his youth, when he was an apprentice at Newmarket. He was going to be a jockey then. He had wanted that all his life, but he got into boxing through the stable lads' tournament, and through boxing he got mixed up with Tiny.
  She was a lady wrestler in those days, struggling and heaving in the matted ring with arms and thighs like iron, but when she fell in love with the bantamweight from Newmarket, he said that it was no place for a girl. She argued that she had stayed out of the mud, where some of her colleagues had made crude success, but Slugger said that when he heard a body go thwack on the mat, he did not want it to be his girl's.
  Tiny gave in, because he was her first love, and it had stunned her; but she quickly came to, and it was the last time he ever had the final say.

She was boxing mad, so he gave up his apprenticeship at the stables for the professional ring. He had some small success, but he was never as good as she thought he was. By the time he was slugged out, with a thick ear and teeth broken diagonally across a childlike mouth, he was not fit enough or sensible enough to start riding again.
  So Tiny sat down in the red velour armchair which was with her now at the Farm, because she was taller than he, and if she sat down while he stood, it gave the illusion of a discussion on an equal level. He could not box, he could not ride, but he knew how to take care of horses. She was a shocking cook, and her passage with a broom distributed more dust than it collected, but married couples were in demand, and who would take on Slugger on his own in this state? Who indeed? He smiled round the broken teeth with a sweetness that rebuked all the fists that had smashed into that gentle mouth.
  'She can't cook for toffee though,' Tiny heard him mutter as she got up, and she whipped round, sweeping a cup and saucer off the dresser with her arm like a violent- tailed dog clearing off a cocktail table.
 I can learn, can't I?'
  They had found the job at the Farm, and she had leaned on the Captain.
  Uncle thingy Catchpole, who was older than most of the horses if you calculated the life span proportion, had been at the Farm far longer than Slugger, and had tolerated two managers before the Captain. He and his wife could scarcely remember when he was not there, that fall off time when he drove a horse tram from Hooker's Mill to the Town Hall, via Commercial Street and Bald's Hill - with a trace horse.
  When one of the tram horses fell, 'a wet, foul night it was, with the Christmas crowds on the loose,' Uncle would recall nearly fifty years later, with the same inspired surprise as if he were telling it for the first time, 'a chap come up with a gun and offered to shoot poor Jim dead for nothing.
  'For the good of the horse,' he says, and all the passengers standing about gaping as if they'd not had it in mind to go any further than to see this spectacle anyway. "For the good of the horse," I says, "somebody get me a knife so I can cut the poor beggar loose from his harness and give him a chance to get up."
  'We unhitched the other horse - Rosie was her name, after the horse-keeper's wife; he'd call all the horses after different ones in his own family. Then someone run into a butcher's shop and we cut old Jim loose, but we couldn't get him up, and we /couldn't/ get him up, and here's the gun still cocked and it turns out the chap on the trigger end of it is on the board of the Tram company. I knew the old horse was all right, just wanting strength, so we was pulling with ropes, and a hup! hup! and when I see the chap take aim, I get between Jim and the gun, and he's bawling at me and I'm bawling at him and the passengers is bawling for the pure love of it.....'
  Here he would lose the narrative, and those seasoned, like Dora, to listen, would ask the appropriate question.
  'Ah, you may well ask what came of it. I lost me job and so did the horse. When we finally got him to his feet, the chap still thinks the leg is broke, for he's dangling it, but I won't have it, for 'tis the string of the muscle is gone, and in a bit, he puts it on the ground like an old maid trying hot bathwater.
  'They tell me: "Walk him to the knacker's, and keep on walking, you." So I did, and so did Jim. It took him half a day and half a night to come them four miles here, but he lived to tell the tale and died of old age ten years after, much loved by all and a favourite with the visitors on account of this little trick he had of seeming to count with his hoof what number you said, one, two, three.'
  'But of course,' Dora told Paul, who was hearing the story for the first time, 'Uncle was going psst, psst psst, to make him.'
  'Be daft if I weren't,' Uncle said, for there weren't the horse born that could figure the count for hisself. But the visitors didn't rumble me, because they were looking for marvels, and when that old grey horse counted - a lady asks for twenty-two once and I nearly lost my teeth - they had to put as many pennies in the collection box.'
  'Pity we can't teach Nero to hold his mouth open for pennies instead of sugar, and then spit them out,' Paul said.
  'Nero,' said the old man, sniffing his blue-black lips up under his nose. 'He's never given up doing that one and all since the chap with the slipper shoes come for the Christmas calendar and used two pound of sugar lumps to get the picture right. No art in that. But old Jim now, that was something else.'
  In the front room of the cottage which stood in the field across the road from the stables, surrounded by grazing horses, there was a browned picture of the square grey horse with Uncle at his head, bleaching inwards from the edges. Over it, Uncle's daughter had lettered in three colours: 'Good-bye Faithful Friend.'
  Dora lived at the cottage with Uncle and Mrs Catchpole, who was never called Aunt, except by her sister's children. She was a speckless, starched old lady, shrunk from a lifetime's laundering, neckless and pottering like some small field animal in aprons.


Although her experience had been narrow, and she moved only once, from the town to the Farm, and never been to London, she had a broad tolerance which excused everything, from Ron Stryker's small excesses to the ghastliest news of massacre abroad as: 'It's just their way.'
  When Dora's mother first saw her, she felt better about Dora having this impossible job, too young away from home, to the crenelated villa where her husband gave his violin lessons and she and Desmond the play-readings and group talks for the Outlook Club, she began to search her soul.
  What have I done? Have I failed Dossie in some way? Running away to the stables, that I couldn't help, for it's been in her like malaria ever since she knew the difference between a horse and a cow. But why is she happy in that stuffy little cottage - that front window hasn't been opened for years; it's painted up - when she never was at home with all she had? She doesn't look sulky any more. Her mouth is a different shape. Is this then what I should have been - a little old lady in half glasses murmuring: 'It's only her way,' as she picks up the towels and clothes from the floor and scrapes manure off their shoes?
  Manure. The child stank of horses, and that was a fact. All the heartache and anxiety over whether the Grammar School would take her since her father was on the staff - what a long time ago that seemed, and what good had come of it in the end? She had only waited until the law allowed her to leave, and then away up the hill to the horses, where she had always wanted to be, and all her mother's careful years of trying to rationalise her into the kind of person her brother was, gone like a dandelion seed.


  'It was a shock to them at home,' Dora told Paul, 'but a bigger shock to the Captain, because he'd forgotten saying: "Come back when you've left school," to get rid of me when I followed him around asking questions.'
  'He's not sorry now, I'll bet,' Paul said gallantly, and because she was not a girl to whom people said gallant or complementary things, she frowned, which was what she did instead of blushing, and said: 'I do a man's work, don't I?'
  'He doesn't like girls in a stable though,' she told him when they were taking Dolly and the cart out with new nails for the fence in the bottom field. 'He had to let me in because he'd promised, but he wouldn't take another, although they're much easier to get than men. Boy's don't like horses anymore. Girls like them better than they ever did. Why is that? The Captain says they're in revolt from the age of machinery they don't want to understand.'
  She was always quoting the Captain. It was irritating, so Paul said scornfully: 'Him too. He drives that little car as if he was afraid it was going to buck him off. He'd want to go back to the days of this, I suppose.' He slapped the reins on Dolly's sunken back, and she dreamed on, no faster, no slower.
  'He's not that old. He's not as old as he looks. He isn't even fifty.'
  'That's half as old as God,' When he was a child, Paul had often heard his mother, dressed to go out, adoring herself in the mirror, vow that she would gas herself if she ever looked like being fifty. She must be over forty now though, wherever she was. Time to stop talking like that. 'Why's he only a Captain then?' he asked Dora.
  'Something happened in the Army, they say. I don't know. Perhaps not. Tiny's got it all muddled up. Perhaps he's been in prison.'
  'So what? Paul said quickly, and Dora said: 'Oh, nothing,' and frowned. 'I didn't mean - I'm not smug like that, minding what people have done. At home they said I had no ethics. But the Captain sometimes looks - I don't know - lonely and sad, with that scar pulling at the corner of his eye. Old Doll did that, you know.' She threw a toffee wrapper at the mare's bony rump. 'Any place else but the Farm, anyone else but the Captain, she wouldn't be here to tell the tale.'
  'What did she do?'
  'She'd been so badly treated, she thought all men were enemies. The Captain was leading her out to grass, because no one else could handle her, and she suddenly whipped the rope through his hands and got her back end to him. It never healed right. He didn't go to the doctor soon enough. It was before Tiny came, or she'd have made him go. She'd have made him shoot Dolly too, she says, but he wouldn't have. He would never think of putting a horse down for a little thing like laying open the side of his head. It isn't their fault. The Captain believes that everything a horse does is conditioned by people. A wild horse hasn't got a character, he says. Only instincts. They get their personalities from people. It's all put into them, the good and the bad. Doll's forgotten now what she had against men, but she's still better with me than anyone else.'
  Why do you cut your hair so short?' Paul asked, without looking at her. 'Are you one of those horrible girls who wish they'd been born boys, and try to look like them?'
  'I've got two skirts,' Dora said angrily, for in her childhood she had led a secret life for years under the name Donald. 'And my hair gets full of hay seeds and horse dust. I have to wash it all the time. Don't you like it like this?' She asked it straight, not knowing how to be coy.
  Paul grunted. 'Colour's not bad.'
  'Because it's like Cobby's. I know.' She jumped down to open the gate between the fields, to let Dolly and the cart lurch through the mud that many horses had trampled impatiently, waiting to come in for the evening feed.

Chapter Five

  Cobbler's Dream made a big hit on television. He did so well that Uncle, who never fully recognised a horse until it had been at the Farm for at least a year, said that it were not good enough, and hid in Flame's stable at the end when the staff were supposed to be lined up with the Captain, smiling humanely and looking dedicated.
  The old man was upset because the Animal Man would not bring the camera down to Flame's end box. She was the oldest horse there, except for Charley the pit pony, and the blood of champions ran in the veins that seamed her narrow head and spare stiff shoulders.
  'Too thin,' the Animal Man had said. 'If we show her, you'll have half the country telephoning to complain you starve the horses.'
  'Let em,' said Uncle, who would not have to answer the telephone. 'If they don't know a thoroughbred is always thin, bad luck to em. Feel er skin, feel er skin now, man.' He laid a gentle horned hand on the mare's lean neck. 'Like a lady's glove. Where are you going to find anything like that? The skin of a thoroughbred.'
  'Yes but,' said the Animal Man, who did not want to spend time with the broken kneed old racehorse when there were so many other more colourful subjects, 'they aren't going to /feel/ you know. They're going to see. And this one - well, she's not exactly a good advertisement for your care, let's face it.'
  He had not wanted to hurt Uncle, but he did. Having satisfied himself that this man with the quick bird movements and the sheepskin hair neither understood nor wanted to understand, anything about old horses who had faithfully served their time, Uncle stayed in the background disguised as a wheelbarrow and would not appear on camera, to the undying chagrin of his daughter, who had assembled her husband's relations from three counties to witness his glory.
  The camera passed along the line of boxes, with the Captain introducing each horse. He had expected to enjoy being on television, and showing off his horses to what he assured was an audience of thousands. 'Parents as well as kids. It's the family supper hour. Great time for viewing. They stick the set at the head of the table and it saves bothering to talk.'
  He had been into town for a close haircut and an eyebrow trim, so as not to be identified with the unmilitary luxuriance of the Animal Man, and had bought himself, if not a new jacket, at least new leather pieces for Tiny to stitch on to the elbows and cuffs of the old one. But when the time came, and his neat cobbled yard was a tangle of cables and improbably young technicians, he was suddenly afraid, and became very British and tongue-tied, like a Guards officer called upon to describe his wife.
  'Not a bad mare......had it tough.......fair shape now..........rather sad story there - er yes. What? Oh - er, usual thing, you know.'
  The little speeches he had practised with the Animal Man were choked away and swallowed, and when they came to the Cobbler, white blaze a-dazzle, nostrils wide, ears taut as bowstrings for the commotion in the yard, Paul stepped up unsummoned to do his pony justice.
  With Ron Stryker mopping and mowing at him like a demented marionette from behind the cameras, Paul told the Animal Man that Cobbler's Dream had once jumped six feet, which Dora knew was a lie, since Paul told it to her as five feet six, which meant it was more like five.
  'Who was on him?'
  Paul stuck out his boxy chest in the tight polo sweater, which Tiny had favoured with her special laundry treatment. 'He's won prizes in the show ring for these kids, yes. Nothing to touch him when he was properly ridden. But he'd never jump really big for anyone but me.'
  Self-exuberance goes down better on screen than in the flesh, so the camera was held on Paul, and he was asked to bring the Cobbler out for admiration.
  'He really jump that high?' the Animal Man asked, for the Cobbler was not much more than fourteen hands.
  'Yes sir. I'd have tackled anything on him. You get that - that you know - that sort of squeeze and lift as if you were doing the whole thing yourself, but in your mind more than in your body, you - ' Crouching a little, with his elbows out and his arms tense, Paul threw his heart and spirit of himself over an imaginary jump, as high as the barn roof.
  'He's a grand pony.' The Animal Man turned from Paul's enthusiasm with a smile and addressed his lecturing face to the dispassionate one-eyed stare of the camera.
  'You see the combination of power and grace. The short-coupled back, the fine legs, the clever little head. Good points to judge your horse by,' he told his supper-table audience, most of whom would never get closer to possessing a horse than sixpenworth of its time at Whitson fair. 'Frankly,' he said, slapping Cobby on his gleaming muscular neck, 'he doesn't look as if he ought to be here.'
  'Blind.' The Captain jerked his head aside, as he remembered too late Dora's orders to keep his unscarred profile to the camera. 'One eye gone and the other going.'
  'Not yet,' Paul said quickly. He would not consider the day when the Cobbler would not be able to see at all. 'He don't miss a thing. Give us a kiss then,Cobb.'

  The pony put his nose up to the boy's curly hair and lipped his black head all over, nuzzling. When he dropped his head down to his hand, Paul spoke to him in a sing-song murmur without words, and the pony fluted his nose in the small confiding sounds the boy was imitating.
  'Talking to horses, eh?' the Animal Man said. 'Does he understand everything you say?'
  'Point is,' Paul looked up, squinting unselfconsciously into the sun that squatted on the ridgepole of the barn roof, as if he had forgotten camera, crew and supper-table audience, 'I try to understand what he says. Most people, they'll tell you about an animal: "He understands everything I say." All right, is a horse smarter than a man? If he was, he'd never be broke. It makes more sense for us to understand them, sooner than expect them to learn to understand us.'
  'By God,' said the Captain surprised, 'the boy's right, you know,' but the head-phoned producer shackled with a dozen wires in the middle of the yard, was making time signals at the Animal Man, who smiled: 'It's fascinating,' and moved towards the next box.
  Behind his back, Paul said quietly: 'Give us a ride then, Cobb,' and the pony put his head between his legs, lifted, and slid the boy down his strong neck on to his back.
  'Taught himself that,' Paul said gaily, and slid down over the chestnut tail. The camera left him, reluctantly, to pick up the yellow coffin head of the Mongolian pony who had come from Siberia years ago with a load of pit props, and within an hour, five of the people who would have protested about Flame's ribs had telephoned to complain that Cobbler's Dream was taught tricks by cruelty.
  They did not telephone about Nero, because it was obvious that he was self-taught, from greed. He never bothered to perform for the staff, who were immune to his plea, but as soon as a stranger came near his door, he would thrust his head out sideways, jaws wide as an alligator, for lumps of sugar to be thrown into the cavern of his jagged old back teeth. He was still doing it long after the Animal Man and the camera had passed on down the line, until a technician threw a pebble when no-one was looking, and Nero closed his mouth with a clack and drew in his head.
  The donkeys from Blackpool were shown, and the camera focused on the crucifix stripe down the back and shoulders, in case anyone had never seen a donkey. Then came the mule which had been found in the canal one night by a man who had gone there to drown himself, but became so interested in the mule's rescue, with ropes and tractors, that he only remembered after he had gone home to dry his feet what it was he had come out for.
  'This is a female mule,' the Animal Man said, pulling at one of Willy's long muscular ears. 'A jennet, or henny, they call them. Her mother was a Jenny donkey and her father was a horse. Isn't that right, Captain?'
  The Captain nodded, although Willy was actually a male, by a Jack donkey out of a mare, but he had not been listening. Cobby had got his foot caught in a cable as he turned to go into his stable. Another horse would have pulled back hysterically, tightening the check and doubling the trouble. Cobby stood quietly while Paul disentangled him, then walked into his box with a roll of his round quarters, his long bright tail swinging like a bell.
  The bay police horse went through his act of standing stolidly with his eyes half closed and his ears lopped out sideways while Dora opened a red umbrella at him, and Ron let off a firework under his mealy nose. The story was told of the brewery horse who had saved her driver when the young horse teamed with her had bolted. She had to gallop with him, but she had forced him to the right side of the road, charging against him to turn left at corners, until they skidded to a stop in the brewery yard, with the young horse sitting down and scraping all the hair off his tail.
  The programme was a little too cosy for the Captain's liking. Everyone was doing a wonderful job. Every horse was charmingly at peace. If he had had his way, he would have stressed the point, not of present content, but of past suffering. He would have liked to say that many of them would not be here if it were not for human cruelty, persisting stubbornly, as if no shaft of light had ever come to the Dark Ages. He would have liked to show Prince and Negro, and show what happened when you tried to touch Negro's head, and talk about the Night Riders and the fantastic, witless savagery of boys who would destroy anything, living or inanimate, in their restless search for thrills.
  The Animal Man, however, did not want to be involved in anything so basic. Let the magazine programmes handle that. This was a children's show, worthily designed to teach the young how to treat animals. If you showed kindness, they would copy kindness. If you showed violence, they might be tempted to copy that. There was too much violence on television anyway, the Animal Man had said, during a brisk, though civilised argument at rehearsal. Had not the Captain himself told him that the Night Riders were inspired by Westerns?

  So by the end of the programme, the Captain was a little fed up. When Dora, in lipstick and a sharply pressed pair of slacks, brought out the two Shetland ponies and stood with her arms round their stubby necks, which she had to bend down to do, he said: 'The little one, the piebald, he shouldn't be here at all. Nothing wrong with him, except some fool woman tried to keep him in a big dog kennel and found that he wasn't a dog. He'll have to go, if we can find a decent home for him.'
  The rashest words he ever spoke. In the next day's mail, there was not only a letter from the dog kennel woman's solicitor, referring to 'matters defamatory to my client's reputation,' but three dozen offers, on postcards, notepaper and pages torn from exercise books, of a home for the Dear little black and white pony we saw on T.V. And that was only the beginning. After one more day, three reporters had come with cameras, and the post office van was unloading mail by the sackful. 'Had to make an extra trip out,' the postman told the Captain. 'You want to be more careful what you say.'

Chapter Six

  Over the fireplace at the brick and flint cottage hung a large photograph of a horse, accoutrered for steeplechasing, and the man on his back was in quartered colours and jockey cap.
  It was not the only picture of either the man or the horse in the room, and the corner cupboard was stuffed with trophies; but it was the last picture ever taken of them together. The horse was big and rangy, with the head of a genius and the eye of a saint. The man, turning with half a smile for the camera, was firm-chinned, with a full, tolerant mouth and a steady gaze. Neither the man nor the horse looked as old as they were when the picture was taken, after they ran second at Newbury. The horse was twenty and the man was forty-eight.
  Callie, who was twelve, with a smooth brown fringe roofing her eyes and narrow pigtails at the back of her small round head, stood on a chair and lifted the photograph carefully off the nail. She felt she ought to be crying. But you didn't always cry at things that hurt the most. You cried at trivial things, like not getting a part in the Christmas play, or watching a crowded bus sail past you in the rain. The big things, like being reminded that your father was dead and the horse which had been part of him condemned, needed something graver than the ordinary kind of tears that anyone can shed.
  Clutching the picture to her chest, Callie went into the front room, where her mother was packing books into a deep cardboard box.
  'I suppose /she/ won't let us hang this up at the house,' she said truculently.
  'Darling.' Anna Sheppard sat back on her heels and pushed aside a lock of soft pale hair. 'Jean isn't a monster. It's going to be our home, just like before. She isn't going to make serfs of us.'
  'She will though.' Callie put the picture across the arms of a shabby chair and sat down opposite, chin in hands, elbows on spread knees, staring. 'She's never going to let us forget it's her house now, you'll see. First Peter was hers, and then the house, and now he's letting her do this terrible thing to Wonderboy.'
  'Don't,' her mother said. 'Don't talk about her like that. I'm sure she doesn't want to live with us any more than we want to live with her. But it does seem as if she knows what's best for all of us. Amazing, a young girl like that. When I was her age, I was still in a tree house, reading Shelley. But she's so practical. It's about time we had someone like that in this family.'
  'I don't see why.' Callie's chin ground into her cupped hands. 'We were happy before. A lot happier than we are now.'
  'That's nothing to do with Jean, and you know it.' Anna bent forward into the depths of the box and began to push books about down there, squaring them up fussily without seeing them. 'We can't expect to be as happy as we used to be.'
  'Shan't we ever be happy again?' Callie asked, and her mother left the box and came to her in one long swift movement and they clung together, crouched in the chair, while opposite them the man sat proudly in the small racing saddle, stirrups short, hands relaxed, his face alive with the pleasure of what the big brown horse had done.
  It had only been six months after the race that John Sheppard had died during an operation. It was quite unpredictable, quite unavoidable. Nothing could have been done to prevent it, they said. His heart had failed, and he had died, and his wife and children were left with the irony that he need never have had the operation on his knee. He had walked with a slight limp for years.
  He owned a small paint factory outside the town, and had lived all his life on the farm five miles away, where his father had raised Herefords before he bought the factory, which he left to John.
  When John died, somewhere within the fastnesses of the grey archaic hospital, the paint factory was Peter's - and the debts and mismanagement that went with it.
  'Too much time in the saddle and not enough in the office,' it was said when it was revealed how little there was going to be for the family after the taxes were paid. But things were different now. His son did not ride. At twenty-two, Peter, who was engaged to a crisp, glossy girl with decorated glasses like devil's eyes, set his cogs going for the long grind up to where the factory might show a profit.
  He married Jean quickly, not only because she was the kind of wife a successful businessman should have, but because he was lonely for his father. He had never been very close to his mother. He had always been a conventional boy, reading books appropriate to his age, scrupulous of rules, wearing the right clothes for the right sport and the right reason. He was often baffled by his mother's gentle blend of naiveté and shrewdness, and the 'crank ideas' which he was afraid Callie was absorbing. They both argued with him about shooting, and he had caught Anna with a leaflet from the anti-blood sport people. Thank God his father had never known about that.
  Peter and Jean did not turn Callie and her mother out of the low, shadowy house with the stone mullions and the spotless, empty, useless dairy. They took themselves away to the newer cottage by the stables, where there had once been six horses, and then only two, and now only the old steeple-chaser Wonderboy. Most of the farmland had been sold long ago, but there was still a good paddock behind the stables.

After a year, when things were going worse instead of better, Jean said that they should sell the cottage and all be together at the big house. 'It's the sensible thing to do,' she said. If something were only sensible enough, it must be possible to fit people into its design.
  No one wanted the cottage with the leaky roof and the sunken door sills, but a fair price was offered by a goat breeder for the cottage, stables and paddock together. Jean said that they would be mad not to accept. Wonderboy? He was so old already that it would be the right and proper thing to have him put down.
  She said this at a family conference, one of the many dismal discussions they had held since John Sheppard died, in the low central hall with the yielding sofas and chairs, where Callie had spent a large part of her childhood winters on the bench inside the fireplace, scorching the toes of her shoes in the hot ash.
  'If you kill Wonderboy,' Callie had said, with the hatred in her heart sharpening her voice to steel, 'it will be like killing one of us.'
 

  'Let's be practical.' Jean crossed her beautiful long legs smoothly and admired her narrow foot. She was always saying things like that: Let's be practical. Let's look at it squarely. Let's be adult about this thing. Who wanted to be adult? 'Peter is the head of the family now.' She smiled at Mrs Sheppard to show that she was not trying to domineer. 'It's up to us to back him up in what he's trying to do. Things will get better. They're bound to, because he's tackling this the right way. But meanwhile, we've got to help him all we can. I've got my job, little enough though it is,' she dissembled sweetly, though she privately thought that her work at the Town Hall was more important than the factory. 'And if you can really get a typing job, Anna, we'll manage. But we've got to cut down everything. No extras. You've told me yourself, Callie, Wonderboy can't just be turned out to grass. He needs oats, bedding, hay, shoeing bills.' Although she was proud to be strictly out of t
 he horse world, she had familiarised herself somewhat with its economics. 'Even if we could afford to keep him, there will be nowhere for him next month after the goat people move in.'
  'I hate them,' Callie said.
  'You haven't even met them.' Jean went on without looking at her. 'Anyway, Peter agrees with me. It was his suggestion, not mine.' She looked at her husband to support her, because although she could not help trying to take over this hopeless family, she wanted them to like her, as everybody must like her, if she was to be a success.
  'Look.' Peter leaned forward, trying to make some contact with his mother, who was sitting stone-faced, moving only her eyes, guarding her thoughts. 'I know how you feel about old Boy. I feel the same way too.' He was temporarily emotional enough to believe it, although he had always been the who was not interested in the horses, and resented the time and money and besotted attention given to them. 'He's the only horse in the world, and he and Dad - well, they were really famous in their way, I suppose, keeping at it for so long......'
  'Your father was not in his dotage, you know,' Anna said gently.
  'You know I didn't mean that.' Peter hitched his long neck round in his office collar. 'I meant Boy. He's in his dotage, for a horse. He's lame now, and he can't have much longer to live. It truly would be kinder to de - ' He substituted: 'put him to sleep,' seeing Callie's pinched face.
  'He's as fit as ever he was,' the child said grimly, crouching on the sofa like a miserable moulting bird. 'Dad gave him to me. You know he once said in a joke: "When I die, you can have anything of mine you want most." He's mine. I want to keep him.'
  'Darling - ' her mother said, but Callie drew away from her arm along the sofa, and Jean said: 'Poor baby. We do understand. We'll never forget him, will we? I'll have a paperweight made for you out of his hoof.'
  'And a third pigtail for her made out of his tail!' Anna cried, jumping up and tipping a drably striped cat out of her lap. 'How can you, Jean? How can you be like that? I hope you never have children!'
  'What have I done now?' Jean turned the hard swoop of her glasses to Peter with another stock phrase and a face of aggrieved innocence after Anna and Callie had run out.
  As soon as they were outside in the dark, Anna had stopped on the path that led round the side of the house, leaned her head against a crusty espaliered pear, and wailed; 'What a wicked thing to say! How can you bear me to be so mean?'

  In the evening, when the things that were to go up to the house were packed, and the small rooms of the cottage echoed round the few bits of furniture that were to be left for the goat breeder, Jean came in at the front door. Everyone else had always come round by the back, but Jean used the front door, letting in an overwhelming smell of pinks from the musky May garden.
  'You're having supper with us,' she told Anna. 'No, of course you must. You've hardly got anything to cook with.'
  'We have a pie to finish.'
  'Let the dogs have it. Look here, why don't you move in tonight to sleep? This is depressing.'
  'Our beds are like islands in lakes of floor,' Anna said. 'It's Callie's last night here.'
  'It's like a tomb.'
  It had been their tomb. Their refuge where they had been alone together with their sorrow, and together had begun slowly to burn into life again, each kindling sparks in the other.

'I promised her tonight.'
  'You're mad,' Jean said pleasantly. Where is she?'
  'Feeding Wonderboy. Perhaps she will finish up the grain bin on him and kill him off that way.'
  Jean threw her dark eyebrows down below the broad frame of her glasses. Although she was not very shortsighted, she never took them off and allowed her face to be vulnerable. She said warily: 'You agreed, you know. You're not going back on it?'
  'Oh /no/,' Anna said ingeniously. 'But Callie and I are just going to ask the goat man - not press it, just mention it casually - if we can have the use of one loose box - just for a while.'
  'Honestly, there's no end to it. Doesn't anybody ever face anything in this family? You'll only make it worse for Callie in the end.'
  'We were just going to ask the man, that's all,' Anna said with the questionable humility which infuriated her daughter-in-law, because she could not quite prove that it was faked. 'He can always say no.'
  Callie came in, stamping manure off her shoes on the door sill.
  'We're going up to the house for supper,' her mother said, 'so go and put on a skirt.'
'A skirt!' It might have been a straight jacket. Then the horror left her face. 'They're all packed.'
  As they went out of the cottage and her mother stopped and bent down to cup her hand under the flower head of a tiny plant, Callie said in her ear: 'Don't let it be skirts for supper from now on. Remember it was our house first.'
  Waiting for supper, Callie wandered restlessly about the shadowy hall, touching things, knocking into furniture, confronting with stony contempt the pictures that had been put up since her day. She kept clutching her stomach and saying; 'I'm hungry.'
'I'm not ready yet,' Jean said, collecting ashtrays. Why didn't she empty them into the fireplace? It would all get burned up next autumn.
  'Can I turn on the television?' Callie asked, and when her mother told her to go to the kitchen and ask Jean, she said: 'When we're living here, do I have to ask her for everything?'
  Her mother looked at Peter, and Peter turned out his hands and pulled his jaw down and sideways, in a flabbergasted grimace he had picked up years ago at school and never lost. 'Don't drag me into it,' he said. 'You girls are going to have to work this out between you.'

  'The thing I cannot understand,' Callie said for the twentieth time, as her mother bent over the bed, which revealed its true ugliness shipwrecked in the middle of the bare dormer room, 'the thing I absolutely fail to understand is why I have never thought of it before.'
  'We,' Anna said. 'I knew about the place too. It's been there as long as I can remember.'
  'One of those horses was forty,' Callie said. 'Wonderboy will have years of peace before he has to die. Tell me again what the man said.'
  'No kind of beast is there on earth, nor fowl that flieth with its wings, but is a folk like you. Then unto their Lord shall they be gathered.'
  Callie's eyes were closed, but when Anna was at the door, she sat up suddenly, staring and tense. 'Suppose they won't take him! Suppose they haven't got room for Wonderboy!'
  'There's still our idea about the goat man.'
  'We never believed he'd agree. It was just something we told each other so as not to give up hope.'
  'On Saturday.' Anna Sheppard said. 'We'll go to the farm on Saturday.'

  It was not like they thought it would be. On the television show, it had all seemed so well ordered, with everyone walking about calmly, knowing their job and using quiet, confident voices. When Anna and Callie left the shabby little car by the gate and walked with eager diffidence under the stone arch, they met mild chaos.
  Two photographers and a small child with starched petticoats and ribbons in her hair were at one side of the yard with the Shetland pony, trying to get a picture without Dora holding the halter rope. But as soon as she gave the rope to the little girl and let go, the pony knocked the child aside and charged head down across the yard, scattering women and a group of Brownies with crusts of stale bread in paper bags.
  Uncle was standing in the doorway of the hay barn with a pitchfork at alert like a pike, shouting at a reporter, because the reporter thought he was deaf and was shouting at him. The yard was full of visitors. Nero was waving his open mouth back and forth like a demented crocodile, and several horses were banging on their doors, for the output of titbit's was phenomenal.
  'We shouldn't have come,' Callie drew back against her mother. 'We should have telephoned. There's too many people. They'll never bother about us.'
  'Courage,' said her mother. She stood against the wall in a characteristic attitude, with her small pale head poked forward and her soft doe's eyes scouting ahead for her. 'Who shall we tackle, do you suppose?'
  They held hands for a moment, and then decided on Dora, but as they started towards her, the pony broke free again, and Dora plunged after it, shouting schoolgirl abuse.

  Slugger Jones came out of a stable, with the tweed fishing hat pulled down over his battered ears.
  'Please -' said Anna: 'What's going on?'
  'What's going on, she wants to know.' Slugger stopped to rub a finger along the broken ridge of his nose. 'She should read the papers, that's what she should do.'
  He stood with bent head, dropping words into a small round drain in the ground, and when Anna asked him who she might see about bringing a horse, he told the drain: 'A horse. A horse, she says. She wants to bring us a horse,' and walked on.
  Callie was looking at the horses, going from door to door, recognising ones she had seen on television. Ronnie Stryker was in the donkey's stable with a mouthful of nails, hammering at the manger. When Callie stood on tiptoe to look in, since the donkeys were too small to put their heads over the top of the door, Ronnie looked up and winked and said: 'Want to buy a donkey? It's all you need.'
  'Actually,' Callie said, straining to keep her chin on top of the high half door, 'we've come here to ask if you could possibly take our old horse. You do let people bring horses here, don't you?'
  ''Horses?' Ron stood upright and took all the nails out of his mouth but one. Oh no, dear. I shouldn't think so.'
  'But then, how did they all - I mean -?
  'Oh no.' He shook his top heavy head solemnly. 'We don't take /horses/ here. Whatever gave you that idea?'
  'You're joking,' Callie said uncertainly.
  'Wish I was.' Ronnie put the nails back in and hitched at his tight trousers so that he could bend again to the low manger. 'Wish I had time to make jokes,' he mumbled through the nails. 'Wish I had as much time to make jokes as some kids has to ask soppy questions.'
  Callie let her weight down on to her heels, disconsolate, and looked round for her mother. She could not see her, but she saw the long white blaze of the pony Cobbler's Dream over the corner door, and went to him and blew down her nose into his nose to see if he would like her. He suffered it for a while, then flung his head and curled his lip backwards over his strong yellow teeth.
  Callie laughed. 'That's what Wonderboy used to do when my father blew cigarette smoke at him,' she told the pony.
  'You been smoking too much then,' Paul said at her elbow. 'You like the Cobbler?'
  'Oh yes. I saw him on television. And you too, of course.'
She blushed, for to her the boy was now a famous figure.
  'Wasn't he something? I reckon he's made for life. They'll be sending for him from Hollywood. All that fuss about the Shetland. Useless little brute. Might as well have a lapdog. At least that wouldn't kick as well as bite.'
  'Is that what all the fuss is about?' Callie asked.
  'Dead right. Ever since the programme, it's been murder. People coming in droves. It's mad. They could go to the sales and buy twenty ponies better than that one, but what the Captain said about having to find a home for Mickey - that tugged at their heartstrings. Like the commercials. If they can see it on the telly, they want it. And when it got into the papers - good night.'
  'Actually,' Callie confided, glancing over her shoulder to see if her mother could hear, for she had not told even her this, 'I was going to ask if I could have him, though we haven't got a stable now.'
  'In the tool shed, I suppose.'
  Callie nodded, biting the end of her hair. 'How did you -'
  'That's what they all say. About half the people who come to rescue Mickey don't realise there's more to a pony than brushing it's mane and feeding it carrots. One woman asked me if I thought she could keep it in her flat, as there was a service lift at the back.'
  'I'm too late then,' Callie said. 'I thought he was unwanted.'
  'Unwanted? You should see the letters the Captain's got. Stacks and stacks of 'em and still coming. He says he's going to read them all, but the thing's ridiculous. He'll keep his mouth shut next time. Only there won't be a next time. He's had it.'
  'Is he angry?' Callie searched the boy's clear blue eyes with her own, in which points of green and grey light flickered. 'Will he mind, do you think, if I ask him whether he could take our poor old horse?'
  'He's never minded yet, as far as I know. He's a sucker for a sad story.'
  'Then perhaps he'll take Boy.' Callie felt her mouth stretching into a smile, and realised that she had not smiled since she and her mother came nervously into the yard. Too much had been at stake; there was no room for smiling. 'Wonderboy. You might have heard of him. He's a famous steeple chaser'
 'Don't follow the races.'
  'Wonderboy is mine. My father gave him to me.'
  'The Cobbler is mine.'
  'They looked at each other gravely for a moment and then Paul grinned and said: I'm not supposed to tell you, but the Captain's in the feed shed. He's hiding.'
  Callie could still not see her mother, but she went to the feed shed door alone, instead of going out to look for Anna in the car. Jean said that she was too dependent, and hinted that her mother spoiled her, although she called it 'sheltered.' So this she would do by herself, without help.
  When she opened the door and shut it quickly behind her, because two curious women were peering after her, she said; 'Oh,' and stopped with her back against the door. Anna was sitting on a broad wooden feed bin, swinging her legs girlishly as she was not supposed to do, and talking to the Captain. She told Callie at once, seeing her face, which she had screwed up on to tenterhooks before she came in, that Wonderboy was safe.

'Jean will be angry,' was Callie's first reaction, without thinking.
  'Oh no. Do you think she wanted the horse destroyed just for the fun of it?'
  'I don't know.' Callie rubbed her hands across her eyes. 'I don't know why I said that. I hadn't thought of it before.'
  'Forget it now,' Anna held out her hand. 'Come on, I know what you've been through.' The uncertainty, the guilt of power over life and death wrongly used. The night visions of the proud bold horse crumpled in the straw with his shining chocolate coat dulled and his eye glazing over. The galloping dreams of John to torture her with the reproach: Would you destroy this last part of me?
  'It's over now. Everything is all right. Come on, come over here and thank the Captain.'
  They shook hands, and Callie, still a little shocked with relief, gravely considered the face of the man whose step and voice and smell would become Wonderboy's creed, as her father's and then hers had been. A door opened under the cobwebbed rafters at the far end of the barn where the hay and the chaff cutter were, and Mrs Berry in a flutter of scarves and stoles came in by what she had appropriated as her private entrance, stopping at the poultry sacks for a handful of maize.
  'I knew it,' said the Captain. 'Come on, let's go and settle this up at the house.'
  At the door, he said: 'Have to make a dash for it.' Pulling his coat up over the back of his head as if it was raining, he dashed under the archway and round through the cover of a bedraggled shrubbery to the front of the house, with Anna and Callie after him like hounds.

  'I've stacked them,' Tiny said. 'I've made all neat. But that's as far as I will go. Don't anybody ask me to read them, for the pony would be dead of old age long before I finished.'
  'I haven't asked you to read them.' The Captain looked lugubriously at the piles of letters on a card table in the small front room which was his office. 'I'll do it when I get time.'
  'Let me put them in the boiler. Come on love.'
  Tiny made a lunge at the table, and the Captain said: 'No!' fiercely, because he had battled for years against being called Love, especially in front of strangers. 'One of them is probably the perfect home for Mickey. It wouldn't be fair to give him away until I've read them all.'
  'Then you'll need a secretary. I've just made his tea,' Tiny said to Anna, neither graciously nor ungraciously. 'Will you take a cup?'
  'Thank you.' When Tiny had gone out, and the Captain sat down behind his desk and began to push papers and ledgers about to find what he needed, Anna sat opposite him and said diffidently, glancing first at Callie and then at her thin hands, but not at all at the Captain: 'If you'd like it, I'd be glad to try and help. I think I can type and take shorthand well enough to do the answers. At least I used to be able to. I'm -'
  She stopped herself before she could say: 'I'm a bit rusty.' Defeated phrase. Phrase of useless, ill-trained women who were a drag on their family if they were not employed, and a drag on their employers if they were. Feeble useless widows who had not planned for widowhood.
  'I'm sure I could do it,' she said.

  Driving up the hill to the farm on Monday, with the car losing on the bends what little heart it ever had, Anna Sheppard was not as happy as she had been driving home on Saturday.
  She had expected to please her daughter-in-law by finding work so soon; but Jean's first question had been: 'What's he going to pay you?' and it was only then that Anna realised that in the excitement of getting her first job for twenty years, she had forgotten why she needed it.
  She stood looking at Jean blankly, turning her toes in, as she did when she was taken aback. 'I think I'm doing it for nothing.'
  Jean peered at her to see if it was a joke, and Anna said quickly: 'The place is run as a charity you see. Callie's going to pay two shilling's a week for Wonderboy, just to make her feel he's still hers, but most of the horses have no one paying for them. If it wasn't for the Farm, they -'
  Jean was not interested in the hazards of a beast of burden. 'You can't afford to work for nothing,' she said, and left the words: /and let Peter support you/ to impose themselves soundlessly between them.
  'I know,' Anna laughed nervously. 'Of course I know. It was all settled so quickly, and the man who runs the Farm - he's no more businesslike than I am. He's sure of his work, but at the same time a little lost, like a person who knows where he's going, but needs someone to read the map.'
  'Anna,' Jean said unmollified, 'you'll have to go back and tell him that he's either got to pay you a standard wage, or find himself another victim.'
  'It won't be easy.' You tell him, Anna was going to say, but that would not be fair on the Captain. 'I'll try it, if you want.'
  'It's not what /I/ want. It's for you and Callie. Don't pull down your face, Anna. I'm only trying to help you.'
  'You're a dear.' Anna squeezed her arm, and pretended not to notice that she stiffened slightly away. Jean had a complex about any kind of caress. Anna had discovered this when Peter came in with his hair on end and shouted that they were going to be married, and Anna had come running down the stairs and across the floor, spontaneously to kiss her.
  Mustn't sulk. Mustn't quarrel. Don't be mean to Jean. Here we are. Me and Callie. Left without a bean. The doggerel jogged in her head as she drove up the serpentine hill to the Farm, rehearsing and rejecting twenty different ways to ask the Captain for money.

  When she finally came out with it, in the stable where she had run him to earth, putting a bran poultice on Dolly's infected foot, he was as embarrassed as she was.
  Squatting in the straw, keeping his head down, he said: 'You didn't think I expected you to -'
  'Well, yes, I -'
  'But then, why did you -'
  'It was only when I -'
  He tied the hot wet bran bag round the top of Dolly's hoof, and stood up and smiled at Anna, crinkling the corner of the eye that was not stretched by the scar. On the way back to the house, she boldly suggested half of what Jean had told her to demand, the Captain raised it by another quarter, and everyone was happy. Including Jean, because Anna tacked on the missing quarter when she reported the deal at home.
  There were hundreds of letters to be read and sorted and answered. Some of them were heartbreaking, some were infuriating, more than half were quite impossible, if you were seeking a good home for an animal, rather than gratifying the whim of a human. Anna was free to answer the impossible chaff in her own way, and the others were winnowed out into a smaller pile from which the Captain would select the fate of the black and white Shetland pony.
  It was a long job for anyone, and it took Anna longer, not only because her typing was as rusty as she had feared and because she spent too much sympathy on the kind of letters she and Callie might have written, but because people kept coming in and talking to her.
  In spite of Tiny Jones' efforts to keep the Captain on a higher plane from everyone but herself, his office, which had a door at each end, was treated as the passage it might once have been by anyone traveling from front to back at that side of the house.
  Paul often came in on the way to his room at the top of the back stairs. In Anna's experience, boys did not go up to their rooms as often as this during the day, especially when they had as few clothes as Paul. But he always lingered going through, for her to look up and say something, so that he could talk.
  He told her in snatches, that his father had died when he was a baby and his mother two years ago, since when he had been on his own. He was vague about the date of his mother's death, and how he had lived immediately after. Too big a shock Anna thought. He had to wipe it from his memory.
  It had obviously hurt him badly. Beyond his fierce love for the pony, and the strange understanding between them he was destitute of care and affection. Tiny threw some at him in her rough, unsubtle way, and boiled the life out of his clothes as diligently as Slugger's, and Anna was glad to offer him the warmth that Peter had politely fended off at Paul's age.
  Dora was different. She lounged inquisitively in and out with her hands in her pockets, because she wanted to get a look at the letters, not because she needed mothering. She had had too much of that. As Anna gradually became an accepted member of the Farm, typing away at her card table, Dora told her why she had got away so young.
  'It was the horses. Yes, that. I'd always wanted to work somewhere like this. But it was just having to get away.' She dropped a paperweight and bent to pick it up. When she talked, she leaned on furniture and fiddled with things, like a small boy. 'At home, they watched me. They all watch each other like guinea pigs, and discuss what they do and how they feel and whether they mean exactly what they say, and if not, what's the truth? When I was a child and I was naughty, they didn't just smack me and forget it. We'd have long serious talks, rationalising, analysing what I'd done and why I'd done it. Moral responsibility. Mother would plug that into me in a precise, patient voice, and then try to make me explain it back to her. I never could, so I decided long ago to get away as soon as I could leave school.'
  'Why did they let you?' Anna reached forward to rescue some letters, as Dora leaned her hip against the table.
  'Glad to get me out of the way, I suppose. They've got dozens of friends who come in bubble cars and gas their kind of stuff. I was always like a footstool under the table.' Dora chewed the skin round a nail. 'Do you mind me telling you this? There's no one else to discuss it with. Mrs Catchpole would fold her hands and say: Mothers are mothers the world over, without really listening. Tiny - she might just understand, but she's usually making so much noise she can't hear you. The Captain is centuries too old -'
  'So am I then.' Anna smiled.
  'Honest? How old are you?'
  When Anna told her, she said casually: 'Well, never mind.' and went on: 'And Paul is too young. With him, it's either to be about horses or about himself.'
  'He's older than you.'
  'But boys stay conceited longer. Children say I all the time, and have long conversations about /my/ favourite colour, what /I/ like to eat, without listening to each other. The girls grow out of it before the boys. Haven't you noticed?'
  She stood up straight and rubbed at the place on her slacks where the edge of the table had dug in. If she went now, Anna would be able to finish two dozen more letters before she went home. But she never pushed Dora or Paul out when they wanted to talk, in case they did not come back. She was proud of their confidence and refreshed by the current of outdoors and youth that moved in with them to the cramped, low ceilinged room. She had lived with John and Callie long enough to accept the faint smell of stables that came with it.

'My daughter is very jealous of you,' she said, as Dora went to the door.
  'So would I have been at her age. I wanted to be with horses so badly for so long, it was like a disease. But Callie will never be strong enough for a job like this.'
  'Why not?'
  'Sickly. Besides, continued Dora with the same bluntness, 'you'd never let her. That's the only snag about having a proper mother.'
  The Captain was not in his office very much. It seemed as if everyone used it but him. Slugger Jones kept some plants in there that needed a north light, and Mrs Berry, violet scented, came in to write cheques for Evremonde, and letters of protest on the Farm's stationary. She wrote to the Prime Minister inquiring why he did not shoot clay pigeons instead of his feathered friends, and she wrote to Buckingham Palace about the Queen riding in a headscarf, and about a Life guardsman she had seen in the Park with a twisted curb chain
  Tiny, passing through with a pile of harsh towels under her square chin, or to check if Anna was not setting fire to the wastepaper basket, told her that the Captain spent too much time in the stables.
  'It's horses, horses all day long with him,' she said, standing square as a monolith in a felt skirt that was as broad as long, with woollen knee socks on the sturdy legs below it. 'What is the sense of him hiring all these old men and children and then going out and doing half their work for them? Not that they don't need watching. My Jones is the only one who knows what he's doing.'
  'He's wonderful with horses. I've watched him,' Anna lied.
  'Ah, he is.' Tiny sat down like the Lincoln memorial, massive, at rest. 'He was training to be a jockey once, you know, till he left the turf for the ring. Good little fighter he was too. Flyweight. Dead on scale. Never had to diet him.' Her smile of pride in the things she loved, like Slugger, and her small hedgerow babies, and the old boxing years, was very broad and soft.
  'Those were the days though,' she mused, as Anna was silent, sneaking her eyes back to work. 'They'd not let me inside the ropes - they think it's a man's world, which is a delusion common to many walks of life - but I'd be at his corner, passing up the sponges and swabs and telling him what he had to do.'
  'How did you know?' Anna stopped trying to read a letter from a woman who wanted a pony to pull her old mother in a basket chair.
  I was in the game myself, you see.' Tiny set her big mouth tight and stern below the shadow of a mustache 'Wrestling. That was my line.' She put her hands on her broad knees and looked at Anna speculatively. 'I could throw you now with one arm behind my back if I had a mind. I throw my Jones sometimes, just to keep my hand in. He doesn't relish it, so I take him unawares, when there's grass or a carpet underfoot.'
  When the Captain came in to work at his desk, or look through some of the letters, he seldom stayed very long. He seemed confined in the narrow room. Even on chill days, when he flung open a window and set Anna's flesh rising, he would begin after a while to pas his hand restlessly over his face, dabbing at the broad forehead, massaging the narrow jaw. 'Stuffy in here.' And he would soon go out of doors.
  The window opposite his desk looked out on to a paddock at the side of the house. The Weaver, the bay Police horse who rocked from foot to foot endlessly with his head still and his neck swaying like a hypnotised chicken, liked to stand and weave at the fence of this field. From a neurotic mare who used to be in the next box, he had picked up the habit of cribbing: setting his top teeth on the edge of the manger or the top of the door, arching his neck and taking in a great noisy gulp of air like an old man after a good lunch.
  When he got tired of weaving in the field, he would begin to crib on the top rail of the fence outside the window, and you could swear he did it to annoy. With vacant eye, legs braced in the muddy patch he had trodden, he would set his neck against the hold of his long curved teeth, and you could actually see the air go down and hear the disgusting noise it made, even with the window shut.
  With a muffled roar, the Captain would spring from his chair and rush out of the house to drive the bay horse away from the fence. The Weaver would wait until things had quietened down and the Captain was back in his office. Then he would be back at the fence, licking the battered rail for a while before he took hold again, set his neck, and 'Arr-a-a-a-' Out would rush the Captain, brandishing the ash plant he kept by the side door.
  Once when Tiny was in the room and he had rushed out like that, she said: 'You'd swear that animal does it on purpose. Miles of fence to belch on, but it has to be this one, with his eye on the boss to keep him hopping. He never sits long at anything, doesn't the Captain. Won't even stay in bed some nights. I'll hear him pacing, or the back door will slam shut and my Jones shoot up in bed like a ghost and cry: 'They've got us!' but it will be the Captain going out for a prowl.'
  'He ought to be married,' Anna said.
  Tiny laughed, down in her deep chest. 'He is. Married to those horses. Where do you think he goes at night? Not that he hasn't had his chances. I could tell you some things. Photo in his room.' She jerked her head sideways and up, her lips compressed. 'I say no more.'
  'It's probably his sister,' Anna started to say, but Slugger put his punchball of a head round the door and said to the opposite wall: 'I'm looking for her to make my dinner.'

Chapter Seven

  After Wonderboy had been fetched in the farm's horse box and respectfully installed with his name in white letters over the door, Callie suffered school like an allergy, and yearned towards the Farm like dune grass leaning in the sea wind.
  She could hardly bear her mother to be there every day, and Anna often had to make a second trip back after school, so that Callie could worship at the shrine of the dark dapple-brown horse, and savour his sweet hay breath, and hazard tall tales of his past triumphs to anyone who would stop to listen.
  Surprisingly, it was often Ronnie Stryker who stopped in his panther stride to listen. Although he was a cynic with no time for kids, his very cynicism showed her to him as pathetic, because he had been so much less juvenile at her age. Also he was lazy and easily distracted from work.
  Anna would not be going to the farm much longer. The letters were nearly done, and she would have to find another job. Jean had threatened to get her into the Town Hall typing pool, which was a brisk incentive to find something else. It was Callie who suggested that she might offer to come in one evening a week to help with the Captain's regular letters and bills. 'If it's not too much for you as well as a job,' she said, with the fear always in the back of her mind that her mother would sicken and die. 'But it would keep us in touch.'
  When Anna ventured it, the Captain said the same thing. 'I'll be glad not to lose touch with you both,' he said.
  The Animal Man wanted to do another television show, since the first had been so popular, but the Captain refused, to Ronnie's disgust ('Next time I was going to have me guitar along') and the Farm relaxed once more into obscurity as the plum blossom blew away before the warming winds that lapped along the top of the hills.
  After some argument, with the five best letters passed among all the staff and no one agreeing, Mickey was awarded to a family with five children on a fruit farm. The newspapers, who had helped to work up the hue and cry over the pony, had lost interest long ago and did not even report who finally got him. Any news over two weeks old was ancient history, and so the Shetland left unsung, except by his stable mate, shrilly, her tiny hooves tattooing the door, and by the five enraptured faces in the back window of the car which towed Mickey away in a home-made trailer.
  After the first rush of curious visitors, the summer settled down into its usual pattern of weekday stragglers and bunches on a fine Sunday. The usual questions were asked and willingly answered, for there was no one at the stable who was not glad to talk about the horses. Even Ronnie, who did not like them as much as he had expected after a childhood orchestrated by gunshots and galloping hooves, enjoyed parading himself as their master.
  The usual brash children were pulled down off the doors, and called in from the fences where they were poised for a flying leap on to some venerable grazing spine. The usual perennial tales were told about each horse. How the brown mare, inevitably called Pussycat, had been on her way to London to see the Queen. How Flame, the gaunt old thoroughbred, had been condemned to end her racing days in a shoddy riding stable, where she was deliberately starved so that oafs and beginners could ride her. How Fanny with the empty shriveled eye socket had lost the eye to the flailing stick of a drunken gypsy. How Mrs Berry, the ugly roan, would eat your hat or your gloves or the buttons off your coat if he got the chance. 'If we were to X-ray him,' it was said, 'we'd find enough to start a lost property office.'
  Round some of the old inhabitants there had grown up over the years legends whose truth and origin no one but Uncle knew. And Uncle was glad to invent for effect where nobody could check.
  'This here is the oldest horse you will ever see,' he would say, giving the pit pony his calloused palm. Charley could not mumble at you softly with a warm rubbery muzzle. His teeth were so long and so loose in his gums that they stuck out below his mouth like a rabbit. He would grate them gently on Uncle's hand, blinking his scant and faded eyelashes as Uncle told the visitors that he was forty.
  He was more likely thirty, but he had been through so many hands since he came up to the surface that no one knew his age, not even which pit he came from. Uncle billed him as 'the oldest horse that ever lived,' but even if he were forty, he was a youngster compared to such veterans as the American racehorse Old Romp, who died at fifty-two, and the famous draught horse Old Billy, who was claimed by the greybeard who bred him to be over sixty when he died in eighteen-twenty-one.
  But the Girl Guides and the schoolteacher with the jostling, clowning class, and the families on a day out were quite satisfied, and the women said to each other: 'Fancy,' and sucked their teeth and said: 'A-a-ah,' in a soppy way. The brisker, brighter ones did not query Charley's claim to fame, since they were too busy offering the worn-out fallacy: 'But I thought all pit ponies were blind!'
  A surprise visitor one Saturday morning was Chrissy in a precocious flowered hat and a pale blue suit which did nothing for her bolster shape. Paul was out at the Dutch barn checking a delivery of straw, and he recognised the big shiny car and the chauffeur who drove it in.
  There was a notice by the main gate asking people to leave their cars on the grass at the side of the road. But Chrissy had herself brought into the driveway, and probably would have driven right through the grey stone archway into the stable yard if it had been wide enough for the opulent fat car.
  She had seen the television show, and ever since had been 'begging and begging' her father to let her come over and see darling Cobby.
  'I always thought you took him to spite me, not to keep him. I couldn't believe it when I turned on the set and there he was. And you too. Jeepers - you did look funny! Were you made up?'
  'No.' Paul made for the archway with his head down, and she followed him.
  'Don't be sulky Paul. I thought you'd be glad to see me. I'm awfully glad to see you, really I am.' She gushed, which was worse than her usual sullen spite. But there were quite a few people about for an audience, and to Paul's disgust, she took his arm and clung to him, chattering away sweetly up into his face as they crossed the yard.

  He brushed her off like a fly. 'Cut it out, Chrissy. What's the matter with you?'
  She pinched him in the tender flesh of the upper arm, the simper still sugaring her cold pudding face.
  He took her to Cobby's stable, and was glad to see that the pony laid back the keen crescents of his ears and took a nip at her.
  'He's still as mean as ever, I see.' Chrissy stepped back and eyed the pony, with her hands clasped behind her.
  'If you held out your hand for him to smell, instead of throwing it up his nose, he wouldn't have nipped,' Paul said. 'You've been around horses long enough to know that.'
  'Not this kind of horse,' Chrissy said. 'The one I have now is an angel. She lets me do anything wiv her.' She pouted, slipping into baby-talk.
  'Must be drugged,' said Paul, and the fat child scowled at Cobby and said: 'He's always been tricky. That Mason girl should have told us when we bought him. Unless it was you that made him mean. After what you did to him in the end, we shouldn't be surprised at anything, Daddy says.'
  'After what I-' Had she actually worked herself round to believing her own lie? Paul clenched his hands. If the yard had not been full of people, he might have grabbed her neck and shaken her until her eyes rolled like marbles.
  'He's much too fat anyway,' she said smugly, 'and his mane's all grown in ragged. He looks awful. Why ever did you keep him?'
  Paul was disgusted, but he was not going to leave her alone with the Cobbler. She could not hit him here, but a poisoned lump of sugar would be right in her line. 'Why did you come all the way over here if you'd rather he was dead?' he asked.
  /I/ wasn't the one who wanted him put down.' She opened her pale eyes as wide as they would go. ' I wanted to keep him and be good to him. It was you who said he was no use any more. Don't you remember?'
  Paul stared at her, baffled; but as Chrissy began to smarm and coo over the Cobbler, he saw that Dora had come up behind him, and this was for her benefit.
  'Telling the Animal Man he could jump six feet! Wasn't that a scream? Oh, I could have died.' Chrissy giggled, hand to mouth. She mimicked what Paul had said: 'He'd never jump really big for anyone but me,' smirking, wriggling her lumpy hips.
  'This is the girl who used to own the Cobbler,' Paul mumbled, and Dora asked brightly: 'The one you said rode like a sack of wet sawdust?'
  Chrissy made a face like the hunchback playing gargoyle among the pinnacles of Notre Dame. 'I came third last week at Hillsborough, so yah.' The childishness did not go with the precocious petaled hat.
  'Must be a foolproof pony you've got.' The Captain called from across the yard and Paul had to leave Chrissy with Dora. He would have to tell her afterwards that whatever the little rat told her, it was a lie.

  Paul went off with the Captain on an ambulance call to a horse that had got into wire, and he did not see Dora until the next morning.
  Since Ronnie Stryker was the only one who lived away from the Farm, the others usually took his Sunday shifts for him, but once in a while the Captain made him come up from the village on a Sunday for the good of his soul, cheap fodder or no cheap fodder.
  'My Uncle won't like this. Not one little bit he won't.' Ronnie was grumbling back and forth between the stables and